Council Rock presents proposed redistricting plan

Thursday

Jan 11, 2018 at 10:00 PMJan 11, 2018 at 10:00 PM

A total of 515 elementary school students will be changing schools in 2019-20 under the proposal.

Chris English @courierc

A total of 515 Council Rock elementary school students will be changing schools in 2019-2020 under a proposed redistricting plan presented Thursday night during a public forum at Council Rock High School South in Northampton.

The plan would impact about 9.39 percent of current elementary enrollment, officials said at the forum attended by about 300 community members. District Director for K-12 Education Barry Desko and Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Susan Elliott presented the plan put together by a 38-member redistricting committee.

Parents attending the forum whose children will be changing schools under proposals then split up into breakout sessions to give their written and verbal comments to committee members and school district officials.

The district has not provided a school-by-school breakdown of the number of children who will be switching from one elementary school to another under the proposed plan, but families are aware because of the proposed redistricting map on the school district website, crsd.org.

Newtown Township resident Kenneth Bonn, whose second and fourth-grade daughters would be redistricted from Newtown Elementary in Newtown Township to Sol Feinstone Elementary in Upper Makefield, said his family is apprehensive about the move.

Since the elementary redistricting doesn't take effect until 2019-20, Bonn said his older daughter will be spending only one year at Sol Feinstone in the sixth grade before moving on to middle school.

"And my younger daughter has gotten very comfortable at Newtown Elementary, knowing the layout of the land," Bonn said. "I could accept this if this is what has to be, but I'm just not convinced this is being done with the least disruption possible. I think there must be another way to slice the baby, so to speak."

School board member Andy Block stressed to residents at one of the breakout sessions that Thursday night was to present a proposed plan and get feedback, and there could be changes before the board votes to make it final.

That is tentatively set to happen at a special meeting on Jan. 25, but Block indicated that vote date is certainly not set in stone.

"Frankly, I'm in no hurry to vote on anything," he said. "Don't think by any means that this (proposed plan) has gotten any kind of mandate."

The only part of redistricting to take effect next school year is some current sixth-graders will be attending a different middle school than they would have before redistricting, officials said at the Thursday night forum.

The school board had already decided that all current seventh-through-11th-graders will be grandfathered in their current feeder pattern through graduation. That means students in those grades this school year will not have to attend different schools than they had planned on, regardless of redistricting.

Since Richboro Middle School in Northampton is closing after this school year, current seventh-graders at Richboro will attend Holland Middle School, also in Northampton, next school year, the board decided.

Prior to Thursday night, the redistricting committee had held seven non-public meetings since Oct. 3 to come up with the proposed plan. The committee is made up of 30 parents — two from each of Council Rock's 15 schools — plus three principals and five district-level administrators.

There will likely be discussion of redistricting at the school board's regular meeting on Jan. 18, district officials have indicated.

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